A couple of excellent TED Talks on peoples, cultures, rituals, and beliefs, by Anthropologist Wade Davis. I am not always in favor of a non-indigenous person telling indigenous peoples’ stories, but in this case, I support Wade Davis and his important work.
If you are someone who is interested in culture, and I can’t imagine who wouldn’t be, this is kind of important. Please watch these two videos.
Here’s a couple selected excerpts from the second video:
“….the central revelation of anthropology, and that is the idea that the world in which we live in does not exist in some absolute sense, but is just one model of reality, the consequence of one particular set of adaptive choices that our lineage made, albeit successfully, many generations ago.”
“A language is not just a body of vocabulary or a set of grammatical rules. A language is a flash of the human spirit. It’s a vehicle through which the soul of each particular culture comes into the material world. Every language is an old-growth forest of the mind, a watershed, a thought, an ecosystem of spiritual possibilities….What could be more lonely than to be enveloped in silence, to be the last of your people to speak your language, to have no way to pass on the wisdom of the ancestors or anticipate the promise of the children? And yet, that dreadful fate is indeed the plight of somebody somewhere on Earth roughly every two weeks, because every two weeks, some elder dies and carries with him [sic] into the grave the last syllables of an ancient tongue….Some of you who say, “Wouldn’t the world be a better place if we all just spoke one language?” And I say, “Great, let’s make that language Yoruba. Let’s make it Cantonese. Let’s make it Kogi.” And you’ll suddenly discover what would be like to be unable to speak your own language.”
All this to say, it’s important to teach your children your native language for what it carries, represents, and stories it tells from the past and onward to the future.
a journey in existence 